The Broker Protocol has returned to the spotlight in recent months and that’s largely because of the exits of high profile signatories. Cooke Financial Group is staying in the protocol. Chris Cooke and Brian Cooke who are partners and senior institutional consultants at Cooke Financial Group, which is part of the Noyes network. In this interview they discuss why they’re staying in the protocol.

Transcript Highlight

CHRISTOPHER COOKE, PARTNER AND SENIOR INSTITUTIONAL CONSULTANT, COOKE FINANCIAL GROUP (NOYES):
Absolutely. We’ve been on both sides. We’ve been in a large wirehouse environment for many years — in fact, most of our careers. And we recently purchased an interest and moved our Cooke Financial Group to a smaller independent firm.

The first step in being part of the protocol, I believe, is the acknowledgment that it is the client who makes the determination of who their primary financial advisor is. If the Protocol for many, many years allowed advisors to move from firm to firm, it was sort of an acknowledgment that those advisors and those client relationships went together. When someone drops out of the protocol, they’re indirectly saying that the client relationship is with the firm and that the advisor is an employee of that firm. That’s a significant change in what’s probably been the norm over 20, 25, 30 years.

We believe if you ask the client who is the relationship with, most clients would say “my relationship is with either Chris or Brian or with the Cooke Financial Group.” Rarely would the client say, “My relationship’s with my firm.” And so we believe it’s the client’s interest that the protocol be honored.

BRIAN COOKE, PARTNER AND SENIOR INSTITUTIONAL CONSULTANT, COOKE FINANCIAL GROUP (NOYES):
I echo the same thing. It’s all about the client, in our opinion. If you ask them how they chose their financial services firm or who gives them their advice or who their primary financial consultant is, I think many of them, at least in our instance, would say — probably maybe all of them would say — they hired the Cooke Financial Group or they hired Chris or Brian or someone on our team, versus a specific firm.